All In

by Billie Jean King

  Just like my ritual at Wimbledon’s Centre Court, I climbed up to the nosebleed seats and took in the Astrodome scene from above. I spent a lot of time just sitting there, thinking about what I was playing for and how charged the stadium would be the night we played. Before other matches I usually prayed, “Please God, let us both play to the best of our abilities.” This time, I may have slipped and said, “Please God, let me win.”

  * * *

  —

  The details of the ABC broadcast were supposed to have been worked out weeks ahead of time, but early Wednesday—less than forty-eight hours before the match—I learned Jack Kramer was still scheduled to be in the booth with Howard Cosell and Rosie. “No way!” I told Larry. “Call Roone Arledge and tell him the match is off!” Roone agreed to meet with me at the Astrodome, and as soon as I walked into his office I could tell he thought I was bluffing. So I got right to the point.

  “Roone, if I step out on that court tomorrow night and I find out that Kramer is in the TV booth, I will put down my racket and walk. We told you that weeks ago.”

  “C’mon Billie Jean, you’ll play,” Roone said. “Would you really give up this chance just to keep Kramer off the air?”

  “Yes,” I shot back. “Why would I give Jack Kramer three hours of prime time to run down women’s tennis?”

  I didn’t think Roone would blow up the whole thing over an announcer, but you never know. And I would have walked. Roone did agree to remove Kramer—but only if Larry would make a televised statement in my stead that would air before the match, explaining why I wanted Jack out. I agreed to that, and to letting Kramer save face with his own taped statement. As it turned out, both statements that aired were untrue. Kramer said he offered to pull out so I wouldn’t have the excuse that his presence distracted me into losing. Larry, who hadn’t cleared it with me, went along with it. Kramer wouldn’t have affected my performance if he threw a bomb on the court. But at least he was out of the booth. Roone replaced him with Gene Scott, a well-spoken former Davis Cup player.

  I still hadn’t seen the dress I was going to wear, but I wanted something special and I trusted Ted Tinling to come up with the perfect outfit. The week of the match, Teddy flew from London to Houston and spirited it into our hotel. He always kept his designs as secret as royal wedding gowns. When he took it out of the garment bag for me, I saw that the dress was an absolute work of art. It was made from a gorgeous material that was as luminous as mother of pearl.

  “Cutting edge! The latest from Paris!” Teddy announced.

  I slipped it on, and it fit perfectly. But when I tried to move, the fabric crinkled and scratched. It was stiff. I sighed and shook my head.

  “I am so sorry, Ted. I’m afraid I can’t play in this.”

  “No worries, Madame Superstar!” Ted said cheerfully. He knew me well enough to have made a backup outfit and showed it to me with a flourish. It was a soft menthol-green dress with a cutaway collar, light blue yoke, and a royal-blue bodice strip that matched my blue Adidas shoes.

  “Oh, Ted, it’s perfect!” I said.

  “Mmmm…almost,” Teddy said, eyeing how it looked on me. He spent the next day hunting all over Houston for tiny round mirrors to sew on the fabric. He wanted me to sparkle when the world tuned in and the lights went up in the Astrodome.

  The closer I got to a big match that I knew I was well prepared for, the calmer I somehow became. In the final twenty-four hours, I was already running on autopilot. I don’t remember a phone call that my brother swears took place soon after I got back to the hotel Wednesday night. Randy says I called him in San Francisco, and that our conversation after he picked up went like this:

  “Hey, Sis! How’s it going? Should I bet on you to win tomorrow?”

  “R.J.? Bet the house.”

  The next morning my brother hung a sign over his locker at Candlestick Park that read “Taking bets.” Every Giants team member bet against me. The Vegas odds were still 5 to 2 for Bobby, meaning a $5 wager on him would return only $7. Bobby was personally offering all comers 8-to-5 odds he’d win. When Jimmy the Greek arrived in Houston the day before the match, he told the Associated Press, “King money is scarce—it’s hard to find a bet on a girl.”

  My father wagered on me with his firefighter pals in Long Beach. When Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick interviewed him, Dad said, “Sissy will murder this Riggs…I hope Sissy shuts him up good.” That made me laugh. Dad sounded like he was ready to play the match himself.

  Nora Ephron, Grace Lichtenstein, and a few other women reporters also had money on me. ABC had its network camera crews all over the country, asking celebrities who they favored. I wasn’t surprised when Pancho Gonzalez, John Newcombe, and the retired NFL legend Jim Brown took Bobby. To this day, Chrissie needlessly keeps apologizing for saying she thought Bobby had the edge because he beat Margaret. The Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson, the retired NFL lineman Rosey Grier, and the heavyweight champ George Foreman sided with me.

  I slept well the night before the match and woke up late, as planned. I ordered room service and spent the day with my feet up, mostly listening to music. When we arrived at the stadium around 4 p.m. I got my first glimpse of the wooden basketball court that was being laid over the baseball field. The work crew was stretching out the long rolls of carpet on top of the floorboards to create our tennis court. Festive bunting and rows of yellow chairs were set out for the VIP crowd on all four sides of the court—the worst possible backdrop for tennis.

  Jerry Perenchio wanted it to feel like a prizefight, and so he had flown in a planeload of celebrities to sprinkle some glamour among the spectators who had paid $100 for courtside seats. (The lowest-priced stadium seat was $6.) There were some pretty big show-biz names: the singers Andy Williams and Glen Campbell, the talk show host Merv Griffin, and the actors Robert Stack, Rod Steiger, and Janet Leigh. Jerry brought in the 170-piece University of Houston marching band to liven things up. There was a carving station and bars where the high rollers could buy the champagne they were now sipping out of plastic coupes.

  When ABC’s Frank Gifford arrived to tape an interview with me for broadcast that night, he looked handsome in his tuxedo, even if it was strange attire in which to cover a tennis match. But then, everything about the event was surreal or high theater. A crowd of 30,472—the largest ever for tennis—attended that night, and an estimated 90 million people watched worldwide on TV even though the match aired after midnight in Europe. Advertising cost $90,000 a minute.

  Frank and I found a quiet spot for the interview. He asked about my health, and I told him I was 100 percent. The few times I’ve watched the tape of our talk in the decades since, it’s always striking for me to hear how carefully I modulated my voice as Frank continued. Some people had trouble with my politics, and I knew that. I was being called “militant” pretty regularly by then. So how do you lead if people hate your guts? I knew people expected me to be aggressive, so I gave them reasonable, calm, soft-spoken. When Frank asked me the inevitable at the end of the interview—“The feminist thing, how important is that, Billie?”—I chose my words carefully.

  “The women’s movement is important to me, as long as it stays practical,” I said. “I think the women’s movement is really about making a better life for more people than just women.”

  I was a feminist, of course. Still am. But again, I was thinking strategically. I was playing this match to change hearts and minds, after all.

  When I was done with Frank’s interview, Pete Collins and Dennis Van der Meer helped me warm up and I had my first chance to assess the court. The acrylic carpet had played reasonably fast when it was laid over the asphalt in our parking lot practice bubble. Now that it was stretched over wood flooring in the Astrodome, the surface was springy underfoot as I ran, but when the balls landed there was a lower bounce—an observation I would exploit later to make Bobby work harde
r.

  After warming up, I went to the baseball visiting team locker room to shower and get ready. I liked that my brother, Randy, used the same dressing room when his team was in town. There were still about two hours to go before the 8 p.m. coin toss. Telegrams were piled up on the training table, so I read some of them. My parents swung by to wish me luck. They were dressed to the nines and having a wonderful time. Larry and Dick Butera, Marilyn, and Dennis were also in and out. With about an hour still to go I finally got antsy. I thought about how hard we had fought to get a women’s tour and WTA, and I visualized how losing could take away from everything we’d ever done. I began reliving all the big matches in my past, won and lost, how much importance was loaded into this one night. I thought again about how my life would be different if I lost. Every place I’d go it would be, She’s the one that got beat by that old guy. They might not even remember Bobby’s name but it would haunt me forever.

  The loneliness of the moment started to feel overwhelming. When Dick popped in again I said, “Dick, I’ve gotta get out of here. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To a party.”

  Dick was shocked. As I’ve said, I disliked parties, but I knew the Virginia Slims team was throwing a going-away bash for Gladys in one of the Astrodome suites. So that’s where we went. You should’ve seen the double takes I got as we rode up in the elevator, and again as we strode through a public restaurant on the way to the suite. Inside, it looked like an episode of “Billie Jean King, This Is Your Tennis Life.” I wanted to thank everyone who had supported me. Most of the players and executives from the Virginia Slims Circuit were there, along with some colleagues past and present, including George MacCall, who had given me my pro start.

  When Ted Tinling saw me he said, “My dear, what are you doing here? You’re on in an hour!”

  “Ted, I just want to thank you for my beautiful dress,” I said. Then I found Gladys and told her how much I appreciated everything she had done for tennis, and for me. I said hello to a few other friends after that, but I could sense a certain awkwardness, as if most of them were worried I was headed for a humiliating defeat. This was not the time for bad vibes, so I signaled to Dick, Let’s go. It was time to be alone again.

  The remaining minutes until we had to play were melting away faster now, and slowly, surely, I was getting calmer, almost serene. As the moment to take the court arrived, it had always been like a switch went off in me and I was in the zone. Done. Gone. Later, I didn’t even remember that Rosie came down from the TV booth to check on me before she went on the air. She told me she said, “Old Lady, how are you feeling about this match? Are you going to do it?”

  She said when I looked up at her, she was struck by how steady my blue eyes were as I said, “Rosie, I’m going to win it in straight sets.”

  When Jerry came to the locker room to walk me to the staging area under the stands he asked me, “Are you ready, Billie Jean?” I laughed and said, “Are you kidding, Jerry? I was born ready.” The corridor he led me down was a cross between Mardi Gras and the back lot at the MGM studios. There were two mascots dressed as dancing pigs. A bearded man was wearing an apron. A gaggle of cheerleaders wearing hot pants was milling about.

  Jerry stopped me unexpectedly by a gilded Egyptian litter—the kind Cleopatra might’ve used. It was festooned with giant red, orange, and white ostrich feathers, and surrounding it were a half-dozen bare-chested athletes wearing gold arm bands and togas. Jerry had recruited them from Rice University to carry me into the arena. Not a word about this had been mentioned to me earlier, and Jerry seemed kind of sheepish as he stammered, “We weren’t sure if you’d want to do this but—”

  “Are you kidding? I love it!” I said, scrambling into the red velvet seat.

  “You do?” Jerry said with a grin. He was just finding out that if I say I’m in, I’m all in. We both laughed after I added, “Feminists like fun and entertainment too, Jerry. It’s showtime, baby!” And in thirty seconds, away we went.

  I made my grand entrance to surprised roars and an explosion of camera flashes as the band played “I Am Woman,” and the television audience was treated to this commentary from Howard Cosell: “And here comes Billie Jean King…A very attractive young lady. Sometimes you get the feeling that if she ever let her hair grow down to her shoulders, took her glasses off, you’d have somebody vying for a Hollywood screen test.”

  Really, Howard? I used to watch Cosell stick up so forcefully for Muhammad Ali and wish I’d had an announcer of similar stature to help me fight my causes. The support would’ve been so welcome. But right then, Howard judged my looks and made not one mention of my accomplishments—my championship titles, the pro tour we had built, how I had earned more than $100,000 in prize money two years in a row, putting me on par with star male athletes. If there was any doubt why women were fighting to change things, here was a classic example. As I was carried through the crowd toward the court, the noise was ear-splitting. But I felt good, even calmer, when I quickly spotted the curly hair and familiar face of Pam Austin among several other players. They were shouting encouragement to me and holding up signs that read “BYE BYE BOBBY.”

  Riggs rode in after me on a rickshaw pulled by members of “Bobby’s Bosom Buddies,” a contingent of young Houston women who were chosen in a contest that week using a tape measure to determine their bust sizes. Bobby was wearing a yellow and red warmup jacket emblazoned with the Sugar Daddy logo and carrying one of the caramel lollipops. It was about the size of a car door. He presented it to me when we met at the net, and Marilyn and some helpers handed me my gift for him—a squealing brown piglet with a pink bow that I named Robert Larimore Riggs, Bobby’s full name. Jerry’s wife, Jackie, had come up with the pig idea. I said I’d go along with it on one condition: They had to promise me that that little piggy would never be sent to market. The pig later escaped the pandemonium and was eventually found, shaken but unharmed, in a corner of the Astrodome. And he did live happily ever after on a farm. (I checked.)

  Now the stunts were done. Finally, we were ready to play.

  Chapter 19

  Most great athletes will tell you that there are moments in a game or a match when you can feel in your bones what you must do, and then trust it completely. Champions, especially, learn to adjust. In a solitary sport like tennis, the need for that skill is especially acute because the game tests you so much mentally, physically, and emotionally. You have to find your way on your own out there.

  By the time Bobby and I met on the floor of the Astrodome, something inside told me to make a last-minute change of strategy. I wouldn’t charge into the match and serve and volley on almost every point as Bobby and everyone else expected. I was going to run him around for five points and see what happened. He’s older, I thought to myself. I’m going to hit the ball as softly as possible. I won’t give him any power, and so he’ll have to generate his own pace…If I do charge, I’m going to hit little dink shots and make him rush and bend and strain to run them down. He’s not expecting that. I’ll wear him out.

  If that didn’t work, I could always change it up again. But I was going for it. I ran through my mental checklist for the match one last time: Keep your mouth shut, Billie. Don’t let anything upset you, including bad line calls—and you know there are some bad ones coming. Look at the people they’ve got on the lines, men in white shoes and checkered pants, women in bell-bottoms. Not many professionals here. Ignore it. Don’t get upset by how close the spectators and chairs are, the people walking around and talking even during points. Stay in the moment. Let’s go!

  I win the toss and choose to serve first. I’m purposely not hitting it as hard as I can to him. The first point goes to Bobby on an unforced error. Let it go. Bobby lobs and I hit a smash out of bounds. I hardly ever miss overheads. I’m not getting my first serves in yet either. I can feel myself walking under the ball and it’s throwing my tim
ing off, so I tell myself, Get up to the ball, Bozo! Let’s do it! I’m still figuring it out, getting acclimated, but I have a great second serve so I’m fine. That’s better. I’m testing him, taking my time. I dump a backhand volley into the net, but I’m not worried. It’s my steadiest shot. I win the next rally and the first game, 1–0. Yes! Now I can breathe. I’m off to a solid start.

  Bobby serves. I’m making him run already, and now he tries to get me moving too. He later confesses that he had no idea how fast I am. I run down a crosscourt lob behind the baseline, flick a backhand lob at him with my back to the net that he smashes, but I get to that shot, too, and pass him with a stinging forehand down the line. Love–15. Bring it on! I’m raring to go.

  For all the pre-match hype about Bobby’s skills, many folks forgot I was a versatile shot maker and shrewd tactician too. Now I’m trying different shots, seeing what works. If I have it, I use it. I stay on the baseline and take my time hitting steady, soft returns. (Pete Collins, who is watching from the audience, thinks I have lost my mind: What happened to our game plan?) Some of my shots land long, but again I’m not concerned. I’m making Bobby work for every point. The score is even through the first two games, and now I change it up—I come to the net and put away a sharp backhand volley. Now I’m playing my game, and Bobby is already soaked in sweat. I’ve held this game so far at love and now I’m serving for game point. I wind up slowly, then hasten the tempo and slam the ball into the corner, leaving him lunging at air. Ace.